ICE, ICE, Baby

There are two ways for a country to get formed engineers. America is withdrawing from both at once and calling them separate debates.

Vanilla Ice’s real name is Robert Van Winkle.

The man who gave America its most inescapable song about ice is legally named for a character whose entire contribution to literature was sleeping through the thing that mattered and waking to a country he no longer recognized.

He is the right patron saint for this, because withdrawal is never announced. Nobody holds a press conference. It happens while you are asleep, and it gets named afterward, by historians, in books called Decline and Fall.

There are two ICEs in American industrial life. The first is the internal combustion engine — the asset Detroit already owns and has now retreated onto. The second is the cold that a formed engineer meets when they consider coming here. Different reporters, different pages, same story.

Here is the story.

A country can get formed engineers exactly two ways. It can buy them — import people another country paid to raise, at the moment they turn useful, for the price of a plane ticket and an open door. Or it can make them — take its own eighteen-year-olds and stand beside them for fifteen years until they can judge without supervision.

That is the entire menu. Germany makes. Japan makes. China has made, for twenty years, at a scale with no precedent.

America bought. Brilliantly, at enormous margin, for sixty years, and never wrote it down anywhere. Now it is withdrawing from buying, and it has not started making, and both withdrawals have the same cause — which is not immigration and is not batteries. This country has developed an allergy to holding any asset that pays out later than the term of the person who authorized it. Buying formation pays back in a decade. Making formation pays back in fifteen years. Extraction pays Friday.

That’s the argument.

The best business this country ever ran

In the late 1980s I flew into Pittsburgh to start a PhD in industrial engineering. Arjun Jayaraman met me at the airport. Today he is a co-founder of the institute I helped start. That day he was a man who showed up for a stranger.

Somebody met me. That’s not sentiment. That’s a business model.

India paid for my first eighteen years — the schooling, the food, the electricity, the whole crushing subsidy of raising a human to the point of usefulness. My family paid the rest. America paid for a doctorate and collected thirty-five years: Buick City, Lansing Grand River, Stuttgart, Chennai, and now a plant in Wooster, Ohio.

Thirty-five years of formed judgment, and this country never made the deposit.

That was not charity. It was the highest-margin arrangement in the history of industrial policy. America did not have to form its engineers. It only had to be worth coming to. Be the place where the work is real and the door is open, and finished people arrive on their own — funded by another treasury, showing up at exactly the age when they start producing, never appearing on any balance sheet because nobody bought them.

Every rival had to actually raise its engineers. America just had to be attractive.

We are closing that business now, by two mechanisms, and only one of them is written down.

Withdrawal One: from buying

New F-1 student visa issuances are down roughly 36 percent year over year. From India — the country that has been paying the first eighteen years of America’s engineering bill since before I got on the plane — summer issuances fell 60 percent. NAFSA surveyed 149 American institutions this spring: new international graduate enrollment down an average of 24 percent.

The University of New Haven lost around three thousand graduate students in two years, opened a $35 million hole that was 17 percent of its budget, cut ten academic programs, and stopped contributing to its employees’ retirement accounts.

Those are American jobs, gone, because foreign students stopped coming. Sit with that before you pick a side.

Now the machinery, which is where this stops being a trend and becomes a statement.

DHS finalized a weighted selection rule, first applied to this March’s H-1B cap. The lottery is no longer random. It is weighted by wage level, and there are four. Level 4 gets four entries. Level 3 gets three. Level 2 gets two. Level 1 gets one.

Read that as a formation document, because that is what it is. Wage level is a formation proxy — the closest thing the federal government has ever built to a capability gauge, and it built it by accident. Level 1 is a person at year one. Level 4 is a person at year fifteen.

So the United States has written into regulation, with an effective date, a four-rung formation ladder — and inverted the weights. Four tickets for the person somebody else finished. One ticket for the beginner. We will bid for the formed. We will not participate in the forming.

Then the fee, which has the best story in the piece.

In September a presidential proclamation put a $100,000 charge on new H-1B petitions for people abroad. Twenty state attorneys general sued. On June 8, Judge Leo Sorokin vacated it — not on compassion, on taxonomy. He held the $100,000 was not an immigration restriction at all. It was a tax, which a president cannot impose. And he reasoned his way there from the Supreme Court’s tariff case.

A federal court looked at the price America set on a formed human being arriving at the border and ruled that the correct legal category was tariff.

There is a tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. There was, until a judge said otherwise, a tariff on Indian engineers. Same instrument, two imports, same defect. A tariff on cars protects you from having to build a car. A tariff on engineers protects you from having to build an engineer. Both work exactly as long as the wall holds and not one hour longer.

The part that isn’t written down

Everything above was signed by someone. It can be litigated, and is being.

This next part can’t, and that’s what makes it work.

ICE’s Student Criminal Alien Initiative ran the names of 1.3 million international students through a federal criminal history database. Under Catch and Revoke, a State Department revocation alone can trigger termination of a student’s SEVIS record and the start of removal proceedings. The attorneys tracking it list the risk factors: a past encounter with law enforcement even if charges were dismissed or never filed; an old misdemeanor; attendance at a protest. Many students got termination notices with no discernible reason at all.

The point is not that this is cruel. The point is that it is unpredictable. Only the second claim is load-bearing.

A twenty-two-year-old deciding where to spend the formation their family spent eighteen years accumulating is making a twenty-year bet — degree, visa, green card, career, mortgage, children. You cannot price a twenty-year bet against a posture that changes without notice and counts charges that were never filed among its risk factors. There is no compliance strategy. There is no way to be safe.

A rational person facing an unpriceable bet does not negotiate. They go somewhere else.

Which means you can support strict enforcement, genuinely, on the merits, and still lose this argument. Ambient deterrence has no targeting mechanism. It lands on the person you wanted exactly as hard as on the person you didn’t, and the person you wanted is the one with options.

So look where they went. Same survey: 82 percent of Asia-Pacific institutions outside Australia, and 47 percent of European ones, reported international undergraduate enrollment growing.

The forming didn’t stop. It relocated.

Be honest about the rest or the piece isn’t worth reading. Canada, Britain and Australia are all down too. China’s youth unemployment is above 16 percent and Chinese families are increasingly unconvinced a foreign degree pays. Not all of this is America being cold.

Enough of it is.

Withdrawal Two: from making

Meanwhile, the other engine. Stellantis wrote down $26 billion on EVs, Ford $19 billion. Lines dormant, battery plants repurposed to industrial storage, the whole industry backing onto trucks while one in four vehicles sold on earth runs on a battery and China builds three-quarters of them. I take that story apart on Thursday.

The one line that matters here: it is not confusion, it is alignment. A truck pays this quarter. A formed EV engineering organization pays in about fifteen years. There is not one compensation committee in America that pays anybody on fifteen years.

If you want the tell, it isn’t in Dearborn — it’s in Texas, where a regulatory loophole let thousands of new fossil-burning power sources onto the grid to run AI data centers and the neighbors found out from the dust. The same country de-electrified its cars and is burning gas to run its inference. Nobody holding a coherent view about carbon arrives there. That’s not a position on climate. That’s a position on capital.

Detroit retreats onto trucks: we already have an engine.

America shuts the door: we already have engineers.

Same sentence. Same bet.

The best argument against everything I just wrote

In its strongest form, which is not the version you hear on television:

The visa is the reason America stopped forming its own. Every H-1B was a reason not to fix a high school. Every imported master’s was an apprenticeship that never got funded, a kid in Flint or Akron who never got the seat — because the seat could be filled instantly by someone who arrived pre-formed. The pipeline was a painkiller. It let the country skip the surgery for two generations. Cut the supply and America will finally have to make its own.

That argument is correct.

It is also a formation argument. The restrictionist case, at its best, isn’t about foreigners at all. It’s a claim that America outsourced its formation and atrophied — which is precisely my claim, arrived at through the opposite door. Strip the politics off and it’s a sentence about deposits.

Both sides of this fight are making formation arguments. Neither side knows it. So they argue about people — how many, from where, at what wage — and the only question that matters goes unasked for another decade.

Here’s where it fails, and it fails the way Detroit failed.

Withdrawal is not surgery. Taking away the painkiller does not summon a surgeon. And no surgeon arrived. There is no national apprenticeship. There is no capability account. There is no deposit at year one for an American kid either. We closed the import business and went to sleep.

A country that neither buys formation nor makes it isn’t running a strategy. It’s drawing down an inventory. Detroit’s trucks are inventory. America’s aging engineers are inventory. Neither is being replenished, and inventories do exactly one thing.

The part that should give you hope

The weighted lottery works.

Somebody sat in a room and built a national mechanism that identifies where a human being sits in their formation, assigns it a number, attaches real money and real odds, survives notice-and-comment, and administers it across hundreds of thousands of people with an effective date.

For thirty years every objection to a capability account has been the same: you can’t measure it, you can’t administer it, it’s too soft, it’ll never survive the rulemaking. It isn’t, you can, and it did. We built one this March. We aimed it backwards.

And here is the part I don’t have finished, which you should know before you take any of this on faith.

France has been running my argument since 2015. The Compte Personnel de Formation — the Personal Formation Account. Twenty-five million workers, euros accruing annually, worker-controlled and portable. Exactly the instrument I’ve spent four years describing.

It got looted. Training providers cold-called workers to harvest their accounts — providers verifying their own value, selling into a ledger nobody was guarding. I have a firewall drawn for that: the people who train can never be the people who certify. On paper it holds. France ran the experiment and broke on the precise joint I designed for, and I do not yet know whether my joint is stronger than theirs or whether I simply haven’t been tested at twenty-five million.

I’d rather hand you that question than pretend I closed it.

So — Monday morning, your plant, your program, your line, your last four years:

Who did we form?

Not who did we hire, recruit, retain, or import. Who did we take at year one and stand beside until they could judge without us.

If the answer is nobody — and it was nobody at GM in 1996, nobody at Ford in 2024, nobody at the consulate this March — then this is not a talent shortage, not a trade problem, not a China problem.

It’s a country that stopped being worth coming to before it ever got around to becoming a place that makes its own.

Van Winkle slept twenty years and woke to a republic he didn’t recognize. Detroit has slept forty-three and is still going. The consolation is that inventories take a while to run out, and the quiet is what lets you keep sleeping. That’s the short game. We are extremely good at it.

The long game is the one where somebody wakes up and forms a person.

Ice, ice, baby.

Dr. Venki Padmanabhan is a co-founder of the Capability Capital Institute and the author of Built to Extract and Already Paid For, forthcoming from Capability Capital Press.

Written with an AI research and editing partner — the augment-not-replace thesis practiced, not just argued. The tool supplied speed, recall, and arrangement; the experience and every judgment are the author’s own.